Great, Now I Look Like A Vampire

I have spent the past week stuck in a hellish circle so ridiculous that I ended up having to laugh at it.

(If you are squeamish, especially about menstruation, this is your warning that you may not enjoy this post.)

The Hellish Circle goes like this:

Body can’t keep anything down so throws up a lot

Throwing up so much causes muscles to cramp, apparently to the extent that it can be considered “excessive exercise”

Excessive exercise can cause your periods to freak the fuck out and not know what they’re meant to be doing

In my case, this is currently being manifested in a month-long period

The fact that I’m bleeding heavily is making me feel nauseous

…which is making the throwing up worse

…which is making the muscles cramp

…which is worsening the period problem

My BFF is now convinced that my insides have basically turned to soup and are gradually all falling out. This would not entirely surprise me. We’re thinking about making a plush toy, similar to those roadkill toys you can buy, where you gently squeeze it and it oozes various things that are supposed to stay inside the body.

How I feel right now

(Obligatory notice that I am in no way affiliated with, and nor was this post in any way sponsored or suggested by, Roadkill Toys.)

Being me, however, I am still trying to carry on doing stuff. Not too much stuff, you understand. There’s a limit as to how much you can do when there’s stuff shooting out of every orifice and your favourite position is hunched in a ball around a hot water bottle. But a little bit.

I’m trying to keep a balance between doing enough work to sustain myself (both literally, in terms of rent + bills, and metaphorically, in terms of my brain needing to feel like it’s being useful so I don’t end up in a pit of doom and gloom) and spending enough time asleep to let my body do its thing and keep me alive.

With that in mind I keep cutting down on clients, and now I’m just doing a couple of small things for my largest client. We have a call once a week, in which I attempt to sound more alive than I actually am, and one day a week I venture outside for an appointment and use the opportunity to drop into the corner shop and stock up on whatever my body’s craving (this week: as much sugar as it can cram in, probably because of the whole blood loss thing…)

However, like many a vain person I feel most up for businesslike things, as well as for leaving the house, if I’m wearing some kind of make-up. Normally I’m a Bourjois gal, but over the past few months I’ve managed to increasingly work my way down their shades until I got too pale and dropped off the bottom of the scale.

So I had to come up with a drastic solution.

I messaged the BFF – we have a mutual friend who’s naturally very pale, and who has made several jokes over the years about the difficulty of finding foundation for her skin tone and having to order it specially. The BFF got in touch with Pale Friend and I received her recommendation: The Ordinary’s Coverage foundation, in the lightest shade, with silver highlights. So I bought it.

I couldn’t quite believe when I put it on that it would actually be my shade, and yet it is. I keep catching sight of myself in the mirror and thinking “god, she looks awful”. I look like a vampire. I’m tempted to just go with it and completely goth it up, à la 18-year-old scar: